Empyrean Iris Story Collection Vol. 4

Contraband

The station had grown a lot in the past few years. It had what amounted to thirty two docking ports each designated with a letter/numeral combination. The entire hub colony was built around the universe's second largest warp ring, though shipping manifests and revenue flow indicated that it was still the highest monetary grossing port in the universe, if not the warp ring with the highest traffic.

Thousands of ships passed through here every cycle, and the residents of the hub had grown used to the intermittent flashes of blue that send ships rocketing out across space, between stars and galaxies. Each warp began with a prechage sequence that sent a line of blue energy down and around the ring, as soon as the ship passed through, the ring would discharge that energy, and the waiting ship would be fired through a warp like a cannonball being shot from a cannon.

Were it nt for the warp stabilizers on the ring itself, the rest of the hub would have been rocked as if shaken by a 7.3 earthquake. However, good engineering and planned maintenance made that only a theoretical reality, and Donovan Red found the intermittent pulse of blue light to be rather soothing.

His operation had grown over the past two years as the hub had grown around him, and more people had brought with it more opportunity both licit and illicit. The hub was so large and experienced so much revenue flow that it was pretty easy to make a shiny credit here and there if you played your cards right.

The hub itself was large, and a few well placed bribes had given him prime real estate on what he considered the, Down, side of the space port. Technically, in space there is no such thing as down, but the average planet dweller isn't a fan of that fact, so artificial gravity, and the way that people build things usually shows a preferred preference for a certain direction.

He was on, what one might have considered, the underside of the station have been allotted hanger F6, which was, on the small side as far as hangers go and was never intended to take large amounts of cargo. On the original hub plans, Hanger F-6 had been designed as a VIP docking bay for high rollers and rich celebrities, but the pretty little bribe from Red had changed that reality. Now, Deck E5 was the VIP hanger, and this was his own little slice of heaven.

All around him his crew worked tirelessly caring shipment of contraband in and out, loading them up on shuttles and getting ready to send them off, and slip them on ships past the eyes of inspectors.

Smuggling was Red's favorite activity, and he knew how to di it well.

The first rule of smuggling was knowing what you couldn't smuggle.

Organic material was an impossibility, that was just a fact of life. The bioscanners at each port were simply to advanced to allow for the movement of plants/animals or unregistered people.

No matter how much money he could have made through the smuggling of the common housecat, it was never going to happen. However, non organic material was much harder for any type of scanner to pick up, and it was more up his alley anyway, not to mention that there were ways of shipping organic material extralegally that wasn't technically illegal.

When Adam Vir had gone straight after his stint as a smuggler, he had given Red his access to the contacts he used to ship human organic tissue, including vat grown human skin, which Adam had neither mentioned, and Red hadn't asked what it was used for. He was sure that if he had a conscious, he would have felt weird about it, but if the universe's biggest school boy was okay with it than, it couldn't have been too bad.

But out of all of the things Red liked to ship, it was chemical contraband, usually the kind of thing you saw used to make explosives in illegal mining operations where explosives technically weren't sancitoned but still happened anyway. He liked this particular industry because it usually meant working with Tesraki mining contractors , who were usually greedy bastards with more money than sense.